Non Fiction Authors From Russia

"... Russia has made a breach in the world evolutionary process, discovering a new direction of social evolution, qualitatively different from the Western direction. On this way Russia has achieved colossal successes. It has found the solution to the most fundamental social problems, in principle unsolvable in the Western way. It has become a real communist competitor to the Western variant of human evolution."

"... in the social tragedy the judge pronounces a verdict against the victim."

"In order to describe a spontaneous historical process, one must appeal to dialectics. To describe conscious-voluntary processes, another methodological apparatus must be used. In this case it is indispensable to know what the social plans (projects) are; how and why they are decided, how they are realized, how, by what means and according to what rules, the social management of people is practiced. This is not in contradiction with the dialectic, it is another orientation of the study of social objects."

"Concrete historical processes are always a mixture of two types of processes: 1) the spontaneous, unplanned and undirected type; 2) the conscious and volitional, planned and directed type. Their proportions and roles vary within certain limits. When the second type is dominant, the whole process is, for the most part, planned (programmed) and directed, although some of its components remain unplanned and undirected."

"La Suprasociété globale et la Russie, Alexandre Zinoviev (trad. Gérard Conio), éd. L'Age d'Homme, 2000"

"At first, both (under other names, of course) can be considered equal parts of the same science, but soon the anti-scientific spirit takes over, just like those weeds that choke plants that we forget to weed. p. 287"

"The scientific mind produces abstractions, the anti-scientific mind destroys them under the pretext that they do not take into account this or that factor. The scientific spirit establishes rigorous notions, the anti-scientific spirit, under the pretext of encompassing the multiplicity of reality, gives them various meanings. The scientific mind avoids using means that it can do without. The anti-scientific spirit is firing on all cylinders. The scientific mind seeks to simplify and clarify. The anti-scientific spirit confuses and complicates. The scientific mind strives to trivialize what seems unusual. The anti-scientific spirit aims for the sensational and likes to surround the most ordinary phenomena with mystery. p.287"

"Current science is not only concerned with seeking the truth. His part of scientific spirit, which in no way resembles science as it is commonly conceived, is far from equaling that of an anti-scientific spirit hostile to the first, but apparently much more scientific than him. p.287"

"The ideology in the present case is eager to give itself the air of science. p. 289"

"The individual is today capable of carrying out an ideological treatment on information received, the effects of which are assured. Science is ultimately content to provide the phraseology, ideas and themes. p. 288"

"It is impossible to refute an ideology. We can only weaken or strengthen it depending on whether we weaken or strengthen its influence on people. p. 286"

"Understanding scientific texts requires a long period of specialized preparation and the use of a particular, professional language. Science is aimed at a restricted circle of specialists. Ideological texts are addressed to an entire population, regardless of profession and differences in educational level. To “understand” them (or more precisely to assimilate them), there is no need to undergo special preparation. It is enough to refer to examples from daily life to clarify this or that obscure passage. p. 286"

"Science presupposes the use of thoughtful, precise terminology, which leaves no room for ambiguity. Ideology, on the contrary, presupposes the use of meaningless, vague, equivocal terms. Scientific terminology does not need to be analyzed or interpreted. Ideological phraseology must be commented on, compared, rethought. Scientific assertions assume that we can at any time confirm them, refute them, or even in extreme cases, recognize their insoluble nature. The absurdity of ideological propositions means that they can neither be refuted nor confirmed p. 285"

"The petty-bourgeois mind considers the lives of others as if it were in their situation, transposing onto them its attitude, its criteria of judgment, its feelings. p. 37"

"This way that petty-bourgeois minds confuse their subjective assessments with the objective situation goes so far that the majority of notions used in conversations about social problems have currently lost their scientific character to become simple expressions of estimation. . p. 37"

"It has frequently happened to me to come up against conclusions which, although made by educated people, were no less monstrous in their absurdity. p. 36"

"The petty bourgeois is inclined to pass off what he feels as the truth. p. 36"

"Petty-bourgeois thought claims to see its results directly confirmed by observable facts. Scientific thought, on the contrary, knows that its results do not directly coincide with observable facts. They only provide means by which concrete facts can be explained and predicted. p. 35-36"

"The man who thinks like a scientist seeks not only to note the facts, but also to analyze them taking into account their chance or their necessity, he tries to analyze the laws that immediate observation does not discern and to 'eliminate the influence of one's own inclinations on the results of one's reflections. 35"

"The man who thinks like a petty bourgeois notices directly observable facts and immediately draws hasty generalizations without the slightest analysis. His judgments are subjective, that is, they bear the mark of his personal inclinations. p. 35"

"From a petty bourgeois point of view something normal and natural is "something" good. this type of thinking makes no difference between the subjective appreciation of phenomena and their objective qualities. p. 35"

"In the present case the man who reasons as a historian is only a petty bourgeois in disguise. p. 42"

"Historical consciousness is condemned, for its part, to take everything at face value; she sees the origin of communist society in the action of supporters of communist doctrine and links the development of opposing forces to the action of its enemies. She is, for example, incapable of understanding that without the help of representatives of the privileged strata of the old Russian society the new society would not have been able to last a year. p. 41"

"Millions of people participated in the historical process that gave birth to the communist society of the Soviet Union. These people have performed billions of different actions. They accomplished them in their own interest. They acted according to the laws of community conduct and not only according to the laws of history, which do not intervene in the conduct of individuals. Some of these actions worked in favor of the new society, the other against. Sometimes the same actions worked either in favor of this society or against it. The supporters of the new societies have not always necessarily acted for it, and conversely its adversaries have not always harmed it. The revolutionaries have done a lot against the revolution and the counter-revolutionaries a lot in its favor, without realizing it. p. 41"

"Historical judgment focuses attention on phenomena from which we must above all abstract ourselves if we want to understand what this new society born in a given historical context really is. The historical process is also, of course, a reality, but it is a reality which disappears into the past. The new society which has matured within him quickly got rid of a historical covering which encumbered it and had become foreign to him. It constitutes another historical environment more in keeping with its nature. Sociological reality is designed to remain. She is looking to the future. p. 41"

"In the present case, historical judgment furthermore obstructs the scientific understanding of the society that interests us, because the stories here impose functions foreign to this society. p. 40"

"It is so natural in trying to understand the phenomena of human life to have recourse to notions of historicism that the very fact of wanting to question them seems sacrilegious. Some people think that we can only understand communist society in its essence from a historical point of view, that is to say by considering the history of its formation. Authentic history, that goes without saying, and not the falsified history practiced by pro-communist historians and philosophers. According to them, the course of events, the way in which this society was constituted is sufficient to explain nature. p. 39"

"Unlike science, an ideology is constructed of conventional ambiguous expressions, which require interpretation. It is impossible to verify or experimentally confirm an ideological statement, one cannot refute these for they are meaningless. […] While arising, an ideology may have pretensions to be scientific. But having become an ideology, it loses all the major characteristics of science."

"Marxism disguises itself as science and owing to this it is easier for Marxism to portray the existing society as acting on the basis of scientific laws of his history, to portray the leadership’s selfishness and idiocy as ingenious scientific foresight etc."

"Historically, Marxism was born with the ambition of explaining everything in the world scientifically. It is known, that Marx even dealt with mathematics. Although he could not solve problems which are nowadays clear for even asinine pupils, Marx left behind for the future generations his smart tips."

"But the [communist] authorities acquire from Marxism a splendid method and abounding phraseology to justify whatever piggery."

"The firmest proof that Marxism is not science but an ideology is Marxism’s attitude to the experience of the real communist (or socialist) societies."

"None of the Marxist concepts (literally – not a single one!) matches the logical rules of scientific concepts."

"One physicist writes a study on microphysics, but another writes a book on the importance of Lenin’s and Engels’ works for the development of physics; one mathematician proves theorems, another publishes demagoguery on ingenious mathematical ideas of classical Marxists."

"All in all, Engels talked so much rot of every kind, that now all the world’s academies of science should be directed to rectify his mistakes and idiocies."

"Marxism emerged not only with the intention of explaining scientifically everything in the world, but in addition to this, as a representative of the ‘hurt and injured’ classes of the world, expressing thus the centuries old dream of an earthly paradise. But dreams and wishes have nothing to do with science."

"School is not only a preparation of men to receive an education and a specialty. School is a sphere of social life which is subject to the same laws as the whole. It reflects in itself the whole society with all its properties and problems, which only transform in relation to the age and position of citizens. p. 502"

"Today, fear of the truth is not a fear of the unknown, but a fear of something we know very well. People are afraid of themselves because they know who they are. p. 302"

"New knowledge [of] the objects of investigation comes not through observation and experiment (as happens on the empirical level) but through logical judgments in the framework of a given or newly developed theory (i.e., special groups of concepts and statements united by rules of logic)"

"I consider him [i.e Stalin] one of the greatest persons in the history of mankind. In the history of Russia he was, in my opinion, even greater than Lenin. Until Stalin's death I was anti-Stalinist, but I always regarded him as a brilliant personality."

"Communism was so organic for Russia and had so powerfully entered the way of life and psychology of Russians that the destruction of communism was equivalent to the destruction of Russia and of the Russian people as a historic people. [...] In a word, they [the anti-communists] aimed at communism but killed Russia."

"Biotechnology is likely to play a role in reducing the world's population, eliminating unwanted peoples, etc. But no matter what we invent, the heart of society will remain the natural man with a human body and a human intellect."

"...Social laws are immutable. You can destroy a nation, but you cannot destroy the laws by which nations are formed and exist. If the West faces a real threat to its existence, it will not stop at reducing the world's population. I'm pretty sure AIDS, SARS, etc. are all man-made viruses. And I am absolutely certain that in the decades to come, the United States will see China break up into dozens of states. This is all the more inevitable since a billion and a half Chinese are violating the biosociological optimum of humanity."

"Western society is undemocratic, totalitarian in its very essence - at the level of production cells. And that is why it is democratic in its superstructure, in its ideology. There is a sort of law of constancy of the sum of democracy and totalitarianism."

"The effectiveness of the Westernist economy is conditioned by three laws: the rational organization of business; brutal work discipline; maximum use of the means of production and labor force."

"I argued from the beginning that in the socio-political sphere, Westernism seeks to strengthen the non-democratic aspect of the system of power and administration, to strengthen the role of the state, to introduce non-democratic elements into the system of power and to make democracy a means of manipulating the masses and a camouflage for the totalitarian aspect."

"The intellectual level of Westerners has never been very high. This is still the case today: you don't have to be intelligent to have power. Westerners create computer models, but they don't have scientific models."

"F.B._ What is your relationship with Alexander Solzhenitsyn? A.Z. _ I've never had one and I don't want to have one. As a writer, his "work" is mediocre, overvalued. And as a thinker, it's close to nullity. I am looking to the future, and Solzhenitsyn, to the past."

"Communism was an ideal for me. But above all an education system: […]. I was therefore educated and raised as an idealist communist, in the sense that Thomas More, Campanella, Charles Fourier or Saint-Simon understood it, who mean a lot to me. But this communism was perverted and betrayed by the leaders of the Party. The reality I observed did not correspond at all to the ideals of communism."

"It is the characteristic of totalitarian systems to understand nothing about humor."